The present disclosure relates to an electronic device, a battery pack, and a method of computing battery pack capacity.
Recently, portable electronic devices such as digital video cameras, for example, have proliferated, and much importance is placed on the performance of secondary cells installed in such electronic devices. Batteries of the lithium-ion type are one example of such secondary cells.
Also, portable electronic devices such as the above which use secondary cells as a power source are often equipped with battery charge level display functions. Particularly, since with lithium-ion secondary cells the battery cell voltage is gradual and has the property of decreasing linearly except immediately after beginning discharge and immediately before ending discharge, the battery charge level can be predicted comparatively accurately and displayed.
Additionally, battery packs are being sold which house components such as battery cell voltage and current detector circuits as well as microcontrollers, which conduct various correction processes, etc. like the above in the same package as the battery cells in order to more accurately predict the battery capacity. Such battery packs are provided with functions for communicating with a device that acts as the discharge load and outputting various internally detected values to the device. Having received such detected values, the device is able to compute and display the battery charge level (see Japanese Unexamined Patent Application Publication No. 2009-44895, for example).